Traveler hotel reviews have become central to the online hotel shopping process, therefore it is increasingly important for hotels to monitor online reviews and benchmark their activity against their competition.

Travel industry research authority, PhoCusWright Inc., has added Reviews & Sentiment to its Social Media in Travel series. This new report provides an in-depth analysis of nearly 1.9 million online traveler reviews across more than 50 social travel websites. The study analyzes key differences in review volume and sentiment by hotel brand star category and online travel websites.

This study utilizes PhoCusWright's new Social Travel Advocacy Index, or STAI, which benchmarks review sentiments across the hotel industry. PhoCusWright's Social Media in Travel: Reviews & Sentiment reveals a wide variance in STAI across brands, hotel star categories and websites where reviews are posted.

"Online traveler reviews are now a mainstay of the hotel shopping process, and the landscape of sites on which travelers post reviews is both expanding and becoming more fragmented," says Douglas Quinby, senior director, research at PhoCusWright. "This new research reveals significant differences in the nature of hotel reviews across hotel segments and even across specific travel websites. Effective benchmarking means tracking performance against a hotel's relevant competitive set and segmenting by different types of social travel websites."

PhoCusWright partnered with Brand Karma by Circos to develop two key metrics to help hotels gauge their performance on traveler reviews—Buzz and sentiment (STAI). Buzz represents the number of traveler reviews/mentions for a hotel brand per every 100 rooms, providing an index of volume. STAI measures sentiment, or the level of satisfaction among traveler reviews. Both metrics can be segmented by brand, star rating and other key attributes.

PhoCusWright's Social Media in Travel: Reviews & Sentiment analyzes nearly 1.9 million online traveler reviews through data collection and analysis conducted in partnership with Brand Karma by Circos and Travelport. The report also segments this analysis by the source of the review (type of website on which it was posted) and hotel star rating. Custom segmentation by hotel brand is also available. The reviews analyzed for this study represent nearly 27,000 U.S. properties of 65 major hotel brands.

PhoCusWright's Social Media in Travel: Reviews & Sentiment, a Global Edition publication, is part of PhoCusWright's Social Media in Travel series, which features a range of reports, articles and spotlights exploring the dynamic relationship between social media and online travel. Available on the PhoCusWright store (US$695), Reviews & Sentiment enables travel, tourism and hospitality professionals to find out more about what brands are Buzzing, and how to leverage the latest trends in traveler reviews.